Dust to Dust
by hanorah
Summary: What started out as an easy friendship forged to spite her father slowly became a burning romance that neither of them could have anticipated. This is the story of Rose Weasley and Scorpius Malfoy told out of order and over the course of their entire lives.


_Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by J.K. Rowling and various publishers. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. The song "Dust to Dust" is by the Civil Wars and I do not, in any way, own it._

**DUST TO DUST  
****CHAPTER ONE  
_~ April 2028 ~_  
**

Scorpius Malfoy did not want to wake up.

It was one of those mornings wherein the prospect of being late for work and gaining himself a nice, solid mark on his permanent record (could it be called a permanent record, he wondered – or was that something that was reserved for school?) seemed worth it. Already he could hear the London rain pounding on the window poised just above the old headboard that was being held together through determination and a spot of spellotape that kept it more or less fixed to the wall. He didn't know what time it was, but he did know his alarm hadn't yet gone off, jarring him from what likely would have been a perfectly peaceful dream. It always seemed to be the case, at least.

Reaching up with one arm, he began to massage his eyes in an attempt to brush away any remaining tendrils of sleep and then promptly realized that he couldn't actually feel his other arm. One quick glance to the right told him why and also explained away how he had only one-quarter of the blanket strewn over him; Rose Weasley was wrapped up in the remaining three-quarters and was using his right arm as an additional pillow. He wasn't sure just how long she had been using it as such, but the fact that he wasn't sure if he was wiggling his fingers told him that it had been a while.

Scorpius grimaced. He had moved from not wanting to wake up as a whole to not wanting to wake up his arm.

Tipping forward just enough so he could gaze over Rose's sleeping body, he squinted his eyes to make out the numbers on his alarm clock that sat perched on the box he called a nightstand. His parents had visited a few weeks prior when Albus was out and he thought his mother was going to drag him out of the flat right then to get some proper decor in his bedroom. Even though he knew his account in Gringotts would have afforded better furnishings, he rather liked his haphazard bedroom – from the sofa he had found on the curb a few streets down with a "FREE!" sign on it and a few springs that would stab through the cushions if you sat on it in a certain way to the mirror leaning against the wall with a thin spiderweb like crack in the lower right corner. They were things he had found or bought for himself and, ugly though they might have been, he liked them.

His eyes were still bleary and his glasses were laying folded right next to the clock, but he was able to tell that he still had some time before the alarm would go off and force him to abandon this nest of blankets, pillows, and limbs and join the realm of the awake and vertical. He would still have to rush to get to work on time, of course; just like always, he left him with just enough time to brush his teeth, shower, find some clean clothes to throw on his body, and grab a bagel before Apparating to the studio.

In the meantime, though, he was forced to consider his situation. On the one hand, he didn't want to wake Rose. She was facing him, her long, red hair unruly as ever with bedhead, her eyes closed, and her lips parted just slightly as she took in slow breaths that were heavy with sleep. It seemed downright diabolical to coax her awake. On the other hand, though – well, he would just like to be able to _feel_ his other hand.

Resigning himself with being the bad guy this morning, Scorpius did his level best to move his arm without jostling her awake. As was his luck, he wasn't successful.

"Wha – ?" Rose sputtered, jerking awake in a way that she would have been embarrassed about, had she not just been in the thralls of sleep. Scorpius grimaced. That was exactly the kind of morning wake up call he had been trying to avoid giving her.

"Sorry," he apologized, sitting up and stretching out his arm, massaging the shoulder to force feeling back into the limb. "I couldn't feel my fingers."

Rose stared at Scorpius for a few seconds and he was just starting to wonder if maybe she was still asleep when she sighed, one of her hands pushing her fingers through her hair in a futile attempt to tame it. "S'alright," she responded, her voice thick as she forced herself to wake up. "Did I sleep through the alarm?"

"No." He glanced once again toward the numbers illuminating the relative darkness of his bedroom. "It's not even 8 o'clock yet."

The groan that Rose let out as she fell back into the mattress of his bed was not the sort that he normally prided himself in pulling from her while they were in the confides of his bedroom. Still, it drew a smile to his lips. His job at the photography studio that he had been working at since he finished Hogwarts gave him regular hours, but hers at St. Mungo's was more sporadic. She had just come off a week of night shift and was enjoying the start of a three day weekend, earning herself this Friday off while Scorpius had to go spend his afternoon taking portraits of families and babies.

"Melodramatic much?" he asked, easing himself back onto the bed alongside her now that there was blood in his fingers again.

The muffled reply that he gave her in return did nothing to temper the amusement on Scorpius's face. While he couldn't understand the words as Rose spoke them into his pillow, he could only assume that they were laced with a few swears. He couldn't really blame her as his reaction had been similar when she'd woke him up only a few short hours earlier when she'd gotten off of her shift. He had't been expecting her, but she'd had plenty of expectations of him that explained why he wasn't wearing any clothes. She, he could see, had found a random t-shirt that had likely been on the floor, which she had probably donned in an effort to spare Albus while she got something to drink from the kitchen after Scorpius had fallen back asleep.

Chuckling softly, Scorpius pulled himself in closer to her as Rose rolled over so she was laying on her back, rather than trying to smother herself with a pillow. Mornings really weren't her forte, though that itself wasn't entirely true – _waking up_ wasn't her forte. Still, she knew that she was going to have all morning (and afternoon, if she was feeling particularly motivated) to sleep, while Scorpius had the misfortune of having to go off to the job that he seemed to be growing to hate more and more with every passing day. The least she could do was see him off.

"Good morning." This time when Rose spoke, her voice was more clear. Her hand, having long since abandoned trying to flatten her own excuse for hair, instead went to pull through his.

"Morning," Scorpius replied, the corner of his mouth still tugged up in that smile that so often teetered between infuriating and ridiculously attractive. The jury was still out as to where it fell this morning.

A brief pause passed between them before Scorpius leaned in to take a morning kiss. There had been a time when Rose would have complained about morning breath, but that time had passed. After all, she had only just fallen asleep about an hour before, having had left the hospital just after 6AM.

The kiss was soft and sweet at first, just like they always were. Then, it slowly deepened, just like they always did. For two people who had danced around one another for years when it came to their feelings, it hadn't taken long for them to take full advantage of their mutual attraction to the other in a physical manner. Even now, almost two years after they had taken the leap that had taken them from swearing to anyone they knew that they were just friends to introducing one another as their girlfriend or boyfriend, there seemed to always be a fire just under the surface that was waiting for an excuse to flare up. Any excuse would do, really – like a shared kiss first thing in the morning.

Apparently the smirk was "ridiculously attractive" this morning, Rose thought as her mouth opened to his. Lost in the kiss, Scorpius's hand grazed along her pale, freckled skin. She thought briefly of the time she stripped down and found patterns in them, drawing them out with ink as though they were constellations. Now, though, he was just dragging his fingers along the curve of her hip and following it further up before it disappeared under the soft fabric of his vintage Hobgoblins t-shirt that she had long since dubbed more her color. As much as she loved the shirt, though, she felt that it could only get in the way and, taking his lips from him for just a few precious seconds, she pulled it up and over her head so it could lay forgotten until she needed it again.

That was exactly the catalyst required to cement exactly how their time was going to be spent until Scorpius's alarm went off. It became a race of the best sort, one that they had become all too familiar with as soon as Rose began to spend more and more nights at his flat. It had been awkward at first with her opting to Apparate back to her flat straight from his bedroom, but eventually she'd had to go out and face her cousin. Had Albus not been wearing an amused smirk over his breakfast, clearly enjoying her pain, it might have somehow been worse.

Looming time restraints at the back of their minds, neither wasted time, but it was Scorpius that did most of the work. It wasn't hard given that, in her well on the way to sleep state, Rose was somehow hypersensitive to the attention he was giving her. Without the thin fabric of his well worn t-shirt between them, his hand met bare skin as it cupped her breast and the soft intake of breath against his lips was sweet to his ears. As much as he loved making her moan his name, there was something particularly wonderful about the soft noises and the gasps that Rose could make when it was just the two of them. He had grown as well-acquainted with her body as his own, having learned just which place on her neck to linger at to draw a delightful mew from her or that sensitive spot on her collarbone that all he needed to do was brush lightly to put her in the mood.

Now, though, he was avoiding teasing touches and moving directly toward what he knew would get the job done and get it done well. His mouth trailed down her neck until it replaced his hand at her breast, which instead danced across her flat stomach until it found its way between her legs. The moan that followed was enough to give Scorpius goosebumps.

To no one's surprise, it took little time for them both to be laying on their backs again, chests heaving as they tried to catch their breath as they came down from the natural high that they seemed to only obtain with one another. Both were smiling, Scorpius a bit more widely than Rose, if it was at all possible.

"Yeah, that's a better way to wake up than the alarm clock," Scorpius said with a laugh, looking down at Rose.

Then, almost as if on cue, his alarm started to blare. Scorpius watched as Rose rolled over to stop the noise, his gaze drifting down to her arse as he considered how tired he was going to be in only a few hours. Worth it, he thought. Completely worth it.

With one more kiss, Scorpius forced himself to get up and ready himself for work. By the time he emerged from the bathroom that was attached to his bedroom, freshly showered and with a towel slung low on his hips, Rose was sound asleep once again. She had a tendency to spread herself out, taking up the entire bed when he wasn't in residence of half of it. He couldn't blame her, really; for as much "junk" as he collected, the mattress itself had been a damn good one.

Rose didn't stir when Scorpius bent to press a single kiss to her forehead. In fact, she didn't wake up at all until several hours later, just like she had predicted. When she did, there was a brief moment of panic that went through her as she recognized the time – then she immediately calmed herself as she remembered that it was her day off. She briefly considered rolling back over, ignoring the fact that it was well into the afternoon, but her growling stomach wouldn't let her.

Donned once again in the Hobgoblins t-shirt and a pair of her flannel pajama bottoms that had long since taken up residence in her assigned drawer in Scorpius's dresser, Rose padded barefoot out to the kitchen to forage. She wasn't shocked when she found Albus.

"Hey," she greeted, wrenching open the nearest cabinet to find some cereal.

"Hey," Albus repeated, glancing up from the newspaper he was reading over his toast for just the briefest of seconds. "You look like shit."

Rose snorted. She could only imagine what she looked like, but she knew that Albus wasn't much better. The both of them were Healers at St. Mungo's and had managed to have the same rotation despite having different specialties, so she knew that he had probably only just crawled out of his own bed. Of course, he probably hadn't had two rounds of sex, but she didn't really want to think about that in the context of her favorite cousin.

"I'd have put on full makeup and thrown my hair into curlers had I known I was going to be judged so early in the morning."

"You most certainly would not have." His gaze stayed transfixed on the newspaper, but she knew he was probably only doing it to appear aloof. "And it's nearly half past one. You're not allowed to say it's early in the morning once you've officially made your way into the afternoon."

While she rolled her eyes in a truly dramatic fashion, Rose knew better than to argue with him. There were some days where they would spend hours with this playful banter, but her brain was still too addled with lack of sleep to manage that just yet. The two of them had been close since they were kids, their matching ages making them easy playmates for their parents to pair together. Lucky for them all, they didn't mind. When Albus had been sorted into Slytherin when they went to Hogwarts for the very first time, she hadn't batted an eye before arguing with the hat until she followed him. As much as she might have agreed that Ravenclaw would have been a great fit for her, it wouldn't have been great without Albus.

Of course, the two of them met Scorpius Malfoy only a few minutes later – the moment the feast officially began. Bolstered by the fact her father had just warned her away from him and the rebelliousness that only an eleven-year-old could have, she didn't hesitate before striking up a friendship with him. Before long, the three of them were inseprable. It would take quite some time for that friendship to blossom into anything more, of course.

Albus sighed as Rose sat down, finally tossing the newspaper aside to look at her more squarely. The entertainment section was facing up and she couldn't help but glance at it. As she did, he narrated what she was seeing.

"Lily managed to get another mention," he said, waving a hand toward the article he was referencing. Sure enough – there was Lily, Albus's little sister, on the arm of some bloke that Rose didn't recognize. She was smiling and didn't look like she was drunk, but she had a feeling that the journalist had tried to paint her that way. Lily had only been out of Hogwarts for a short while, but her penchant for having fun and making rude gestures at photographers had given her a reputation. She was mentioned almost as much as Victoire and Teddy.

"They'll get bored eventually," Rose decided, flipping the newspaper over so she didn't have to look at the moving photograph of her cousin. "They go in cycles with us, really."

"True," Albus agreed, looking thoughtful. Then, he grinned. "Just imagine how they're going to react when you and Scorpius finally get married."

The withering look that Rose gave him only fueled his amusement.

"They'll be following you to dress shops, trying to get _inside tips_ on what kind of flowers there are and who your caterer is."

When Rose stayed silent, ignoring him completely as she pretended to read the newspaper, Albus only took that as an invitation to continue.

"The article after you announce the engagement will be particularly wonderful." He leaned back in his chair, holding out one hand as though presenting the actual article to her at that moment. "'Bridging together two families, Scorpius Malfoy and Rose Weasley are proving to the world that longtime rivalries can result in a beautiful love story.' Oh, throw in a few references to you being Juliet and Scorpius being Romeo and – hey, where are you going?"

With her cereal bowl in hand, Rose afforded him only one last bit of attention: that rude gesture that Lily loved flashing at the paparazzi.

* * *

_Hello, friends! Welcome to "Dust to Dust". This is going to be written out of order, jumping here and there throughout the years of Rose and Scorpius's relationship, but with an overarching plot that connects them all. I will always have the date at the top, so you'll always know when the chapter is taking place. I have many ideas, but if there are ever any moments in their relationship that you would like to see, feel free to leave a comment and request it! I can't promise that I'll do it as it will depend completely on how inspired I am, but I'll definitely give it a shot. As evidenced by this chapter and its M rating, there will be mature themes, but it won't be every chapter - if the occasional lemons aren't your thing, you might want to bail now!_

_Anyway, I'm excited to share this story with you all and would love to hear what you think! Thank you for reading! - Han_


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